Condos Race for Space

By

Josh Barbanel

April 22, 2013 9:35 p.m. ET

A century ago, a much-admired brick-and-limestone mansion was demolished on East 68th Street and Madison Avenue to make way for the latest innovation for the rich—an 11-story Beaux-Arts building with many apartments larger than a typical townhouse in the neighborhood.

"The service is neither seen nor heard," gushed a report in the New York Herald in 1914, celebrating a separate wing for servants in each large apartment. In...